aid he; 'I wonder
what it feels like when you move from place to place so as to live in a
perpetual spring and summer.'

'I don't think it can be the real spring,' she said, after a second.
'The summer, I suppose, is the same anywhere; it hasn't the newness and
the strangeness of the spring. Wouldn't it be a nice thing now to be
able to take some poor English lady who has been compelled to live all
the early months of each year in the south, among hot-house sort of
things, and just to show her for a minute a little English village in
the real spring time, such as she must have known when she was a girl,
with the daffodils in the cottage gardens, and the young leaves on the
elm and the hawthorn. And perhaps a lark would be singing high up; and
there might be a scent of wallflower; and the children coming home with
daisy wreaths. She would cry, perhaps; but she would like it better
than the hot-house flowers and the Riviera. There are some things that
have a wonderful way of bringing back old memories--the first smell of
wallflower in the spring is one, and the first fall of snow in the
winter. And there's an old-fashioned kind of musky smell, too, that
always means Sunday clothes, and a tall pew, and a village choir.'

'But you seem to have a strong faculty of association,' said young
Frank King, who was far more interested in Nan than in musk.

'I don't know,' she said carelessly. 'I don't study myself much. But
I know I have a strong bump of locality--isn't that what they call it?
I wish I had been born in a splendid place. I wish I had been born
among great mountains, or amongst remote sea islands, or even beautiful
lake scenery; and I know I should have loved my native place
passionately and yearned for it; and I should have thought it was the
most beautiful place in the world--especially when I was away from
it--for that's the usual way. But when you are born in London and live
in Brighton, you can't make much out of that.'

Then she added with some compunction,

'Not but that I am very fond of the south coast. I know it so well;
and of course you get fond of anything that you are very intimate with,
especially if other people don't know much about it. And there is far
more solitariness about the south coast than the people imagine who
come down to the Bedford Hotel for a week.'

'You are a great walker, are you not?' he said.

'Oh no; but I walk a good deal.'

'And always alone?'

'Generally.